Nitride-based LEDs (light-emitting diodes), for example, can be manufactured by epitaxial growth on a sapphire substrate. Thus far, removing the sapphire substrate has been performed in view of increasing light extraction efficiency. In this case, since LED epitaxial layers are very thin, supporting the LED epitaxial layers with a supporting substrate before removing the sapphire substrate has been performed.
For example, the specification of U.S. Pat. No. 7,256,483 discloses a method in which a sapphire substrate and LED epitaxial layers in a wafer state undergo dicing to be fragment, each resulting LED chip is mounted on a supporting substrate, and then the sapphire substrate is removed for each chip by the laser lift-off method. In this case, since mounting on the supporting substrate and removing the sapphire substrate are performed for each fragment chip, the method is inefficient.